


The Hare and the Wolf

by isamariposa



Category: Chernobyl (TV 2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Daemons, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-11
Updated: 2019-06-11
Packaged: 2020-04-24 05:21:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,631
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19166632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/isamariposa/pseuds/isamariposa
Summary: For the prompt: "Daemon AU - Legasov's and Shcherbina's daemons are simpatico before their humans start to become friends."





	The Hare and the Wolf

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry.

Everyone in the meeting room is dutifully subdued, and daemons mostly out of sight - under the table, hiding in pockets, unobtrusively perched behind their person's chairs. Valery's eyes are glued to the report, but Ninochka won't stop jumping on his thigh, then leaps to his shoulder when he tries to ignore her.

"You have to say something!" she whispers in his ear.

"Shush," Valery pleads, but the more he reads, the more he knows she's right.

Her... agitation is getting noticed by the man directly in front of him, a stern-looking minister with a dog daemon tall enough to peek across the table. He's the one who phoned him this morning. He glances at Valery briefly, but continues speaking to Gorbachev - soothing words destined to bury any administrative concerns.

"...no cause for concern," the minister concludes and leans back in his chair. Shcherbina. His name is Boris Shcherbina. His dog daemon wags her tail with some satisfaction.

The meeting is about to be adjourned. Ninochka leaps onto the table, knocking over papers, bottles, and pencils. Disrupting everything. Valery too stands.

"No!" he says. "I can't. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. Page 3..."

Across the table, the dog daemon narrows her eyes. They are unnaturally golden. Valery forces himself to speak, even as he notices that Shcherbina's daemon is not a dog at all. It's a wolf. A wolf large enough to snap a small hare's neck in two. The wolf bares her teeth as Shcherbina dismisses Valery's concerns one by one and she places a paw on the table, as if about to leap. But Ninochka does not stop her hysteric jumping over the papers.

"Calm yourselves," Gorbachev barks out. His daemon's dark red feathers are ruffled. "Control your daemons. Are you children, to let them interact like this in the middle of a cabinet meeting?"

Valery swallows, and grabs Ninochka by the soft fur of her upper neck to remove her off the table. She cuddles against him, burrowing in the crook of his arm. Her long ears are trembling. The wolf sits back down, but her golden gaze will not leave Valery's daemon.

"I apologize," he says. "I didn't mean... May I please express my concerns as calmly and respectfully...?"

Shcherbina cuts him off again, but Gorbachev's raven tilts her head, and he bids Valery to speak.

 

* * *

 

Later, in the helicopter, the wolf daemon paces back and forth, and bares her teeth at Ninochka periodically. Valery tries to ignore all of it, Shcherbina, his aggressive daemon, the armed soldiers flanking him, and this dangerous mission he'd rather not be in if his worse fears are proven true. 

"Lesovikha," Shcherbina calls when she strays too close to Ninochka, but the daemon does not return to his side. "Keep your bunny away," he says when Ninochka leaps down from Valery's lap.

"She's not a bunny," Valery says, offended. He extends a hand to call Ninochka, but she ignores it pointedly as she jumps closer to Lesovikha, small, nervous little jumps. "She's an arctic hare. A small one."

"Looks like a bunny," Shcherbina says with a shrug.

Later during the flight, he wants to know how a nuclear reactor works. Ninochka rolls her eyes, and Lesovikha does jump to attack this time. Valery sees it in a flash: his daemon, neck snapped in two, red blood splattered on her white fur. So he sticks his leg out, to shield Ninochka, but it has the rather unfortunate consequence to kick Lesovikha. Just barely, and only with the side of his calf. The daemon yelps and recoils away. Valery shudders in disgust, and Shcherbina looks quite determined to strangle him.

"I'm sorry," Valery says, and straightens his tie as Ninochka returns to his lap. "I will explain how the reactor works," he offers, and searches his pocket for a pen.

Shcherbina is a bureaucratic idiot. Valery knows that. He still explains nuclear fusion to him, as patiently and as easily as possible, and he tries not to notice that Lesovikha looks pleased. But his worst nightmare looms in the horizon, bright like the ionized radiation glowing over the broken reactor. Valery stares and stares, horrified, his heart shrinking with every heartbeat. Ninochka bounces all over the cabin, sharing his dread, though he dearly wishes she could just cuddle next to him.

"Fly us directly over the building," Shcherbina commands casually, unaware of the danger of what he's proposing.

Valery glances at Lesovikha. She's lying down, belly to the floor of the cabin, her ears flattened over her head as if she were terrified. Ninochka is standing next to her, and to Valery's horror she nuzzles Lesovikha's belly as if trying to comfort the wolf. Maybe that's what spurs him to call Shcherbina 'Boris', though it only earns him a rebuke. But the great wolf is subdued, hesitant - afraid. The pilot's rat daemon only has to glance back at her to make up her mind, and abort the flight over the reactor. 

 

* * *

 

He's never seen Ninochka behave like this. She usually keeps to herself or prefers to stay in his arms. But the moment they touch down she stays on the ground, drawn to Lesovikha and following her around everywhere. It's infuriating. Even more so when Shcherbina unexpectedly demonstrates he does have a brain, and stands up for Valery against the Party's bumbling incompetents. Lesovikha wags her tail when he looks at her.

As they wait for the latest readings in the makeshift army tent, Valery glances at their daemons again. He's disgusted to find Lesovikha licking the soft fur behind Ninochka's ears. He crosses over to pick her up and tries to keep her on his lap, though she settles on his shoulder.

"Why are you like this?" he scolds. 

"I like him," Ninochka says, in his ear. "He's not a bad man."

"He's going to get us all killed is what he is."

"He has a good heart. He listened to us. You'll see." She jumps down to his lap and stares up at him. Her white fur is taking on a greyish tint, and there's a sorrow in her eyes that was not there before. "We're going to die," she whispers.

"I know," Valery says, with a knot in his throat. 

He strokes Ninochka, wishing she could fall asleep. Wishing they could both fall asleep. Across the tent, Lesovikha is watching them with her golden eyes.

 

* * *

 

They reach an uneasy truce, somehow, because Shcherbina seems determined to listen to Valery's harebrained suggestions on how to deal with the disaster, outrageous as they might sound. He's good at getting things done. Valery doesn't know whether to feel vaguely grateful, or to lament that he's still too thickheaded to order an evacuation. Lesovikha falls into step with Ninochka, as if they were a team. Valery tries not to look at them.

"We're staying here," Shcherbina says with a shrug when Valery once again begs him to evacuate the people.

"Yes we are. And we'll be dead in five years!" Valery says, brutally.

Shcherbina pales at once. He stares at him without blinking, fear written plainly over his features for the first time. Lesovikha whimpers, sounding more like a puppy than a wolf. _Shit_ , Valery thinks. They didn't know. Shcherbina truly had no idea what they were facing.

"I'm sorry, I..." Valery says, wishing he was less of an oaf, wishing he'd broken the news in a more tactful way. He's never been good at this. "I'm sorry."

Shcherbina is still looking at him, his face now blank with shock as he contemplates his own mortality. Valery takes a step forward, wanting to comfort him, but he was refused the one time he called him Boris. So he stops moving. Ninochka, however, isn't concerned with propriety. She saunters over to Lesovikha, nuzzling her, petting her, rubbing their ears together. Valery stares at that. So does Shcherbina, but the sight of it seems to be too much for him, and he makes his slow way to the armchair of the hotel room. Lesovikha follows him. She licks his hand softly, and he pets her head, absent, still too discombobulated for words. 

"Ninochka," Valery warns when she wanders too close to Shcherbina.

Ninochka turns her head to look at him, her dark eyes unreadable. Then she faces Shcherbina again, and shockingly, unexpectedly, presses her muzzle against his leg. He nearly jumps at the contact and stares down at the hare, eyes wide, as if all of his earlier shock transferred into his reaction to this gesture. Valery is too mortified to apologize - too shocked himself, because instead of the revulsion he felt earlier when he kicked Lesovikha by accident, this is not entirely unpleasant. But it should be. This is wrong. Yet Shcherbina moves a trembling hand towards Ninochka, slow enough for her to move away if she wants to. But she does not. Valery's heart stops. Is he going to touch her? 

It's barely a caress. Shcherbina's fingers hover just above Ninochka's soft fur between her ears, where Lesovikha likes licking her. Valery can't suppress a shiver. It's been... ages, really. His late wife never liked doing this. The sense of closeness is exhilarating and intoxicating all at once. He takes a deep breath. He never realized how keenly he desired this.

But then the phone rings, and they all snap out of their trance.

 

* * *

 

 

They don't speak of it. 

What for? There are a thousand more pressing matters. The exposed core. The graphite on the roof. The deadly radiation permeating everything around them. The clock ticking down to their inevitable deaths. 

But in rare moments of quiet, Ninochka likes dozing off on Shcherbina's lap. Lesovikha's belly is impossibly soft to the touch. 

The next time Valery dares to call him Boris, he does not object.

  

 

 

 


End file.
